How It All Started
Motorhome
I would like to make one thing clear before I go any further. I am in no way a "writer”. I'm a seventy year old retired " heavy duty transportation engineer" aka truck driver. There are way too many serious people in this world. I was more of the"class clown" throughout my lifetime.Two things that I was serious about were fishing and keeping my possessions looking nice. In 2009 myself and four of my best friends made our first trip to Terrace, British Columbia to fish the mighty Skeena River. I had a every close call health wise and my wife sat me down and pretty much asked me how I would like to die without ever getting to do any of the things I dreamed about, all because I used the excuse that I was too busy at work. It was supposed to be the"trip of a lifetime". Trouble was,I got hooked. The first five trips one of us would drive up and the other four would fly up. On the sixth trip I, my wife and another couple drove up and we towed my 23ft. Willie Boat. That is when I decided to get the motorhome and the stacker trailer which made trips number eight and nine.
Terrace is just over 1700 miles from where I live in Fortuna,Ca. I am one of those unlucky persons that have issues with my back and spinal cord. I can usually drive about 300-350 miles a day. Pretty wimpy for a guy that used to drive almost twice that in a day. It's not much fun trying to get your four door diesel pickup with a 23 ft. boat with all your worldly fishing possessions parked in a hotel parking lot without ending up way out in the rear with no lighting. You may as well put up a sign that says "here you go thieves it's all yours" I'm not very smart, HERE"S MY SIGN. It surely wouldn't be a nice way to end a perfect vacation. If I had a motorhome I wouldn't have to deal with crap like this. So what do you take and what do you leave behind? You won't be able to rent the right boat when you get there, so that's out. You would play hell at a car rental when you tell them you need a four wheel drive pickup that you can pull a boat with. I know, I tried once. I remembered seeing a picture of an outboard stacker trailer in a magazine or online somewhere. It took some time to find one and required a complete overhaul from one end to the other, as it was a real p.o.s. I had the overhaul work done professionally in White City, Or. by Chandler Custom Fabrication. The owner is Mark Chandler whom I have known for over twenty some years . Mark was the fabrication foreman at Fish Rite boats for many years and built me seven different boats over that time. He now builds aluminum boat trailers. I guess it goes without saying that Mark also built the boat that had to be custom built to fit the trailer. As you can see there are four separate items to make this a complete package, which all took a lot of planning to make it work. The motorhome, the trailer, the boat and the pickup. I guess we should start at the front of the bus! (ha-ha) There are tens of thousands of motorhomes for sale out there. My main concerns when looking were, number one- not to exceed 40 ft. Number two- big horsepower, number three-best quality and number four- must look nice. The reason the coach could not exceed 40 ft. is that there are places that you cannot exceed 65 ft. from bumper to bumper. My home town here on hwy 101 is even this way. Also a 40 ft. turns and tracks so much better than a 45 or even a 42 ft. The only trouble is that most 40ft coaches are only two axles. The way they get away with this is that they are cheaply built using non wood components, the cheapest of everything. They also do not have the stability of a three axle nor do they have the stopping capability. There are not many 3 axle 40 ft. coaches built. I knew that the package when all hooked together was going to come in somewhere around 60,000lb. range (that's exactly what it came in at) so, there's one thing there's no substitute for, HORSEPOWER. I started my trucking career as a driver at 18 yrs. old in 1972. In 1974 I purchased my first truck, a brand new Peterbilt with a Cummins engine. I remained a Cummins guy until the late 80's, when I started buying Cat power. I remained a hard core Cat guy for the rest of my career. My blood ran Cat yellow. Fast forward to 2015 when I retired with 33 Pete's all with Cat power. About half of them were C12's, which was one of the most dependable engines Cat ever built. They discontinued it in 2003. It was replaced by the C13. This was by far the biggest piece of crap that Cat ever built. Half of the time you would see them going down the road under their own power and the other half they were behind a tow truck. They cost me a lot of money to run until I retired and sold the business. Cat has not built a truck or motorhome engine in several years. Something to consider is that in the old days you could call a service truck to come out and fix you on the road, whereas now they make you have it towed to their shop. It takes a very specialized wrecker to do this. It has to be able to reach a very long distance to attach to the set back front axle, which usually weighs 12,000 lbs or more. These wreckers can cost as much as $650.00 or more an hour, and sometimes they are hours away. In my search for the right motorhome I found many that had the C13 and I didn't want to go down that road again. Breaking down on the road in your coach away from home and trying to get parts for an engine that is not even built any more and is considered obsolete doesn't sound like much fun to me. I'm not saying don't buy one, I'm just saying that now that you know the facts, you 've been warned. I prefer to jump in my coach, turn the key on my 600hp Cummins and not worry, I've never had it miss a best!
My wife and I looked at what seemed like an endless number of coaches. I can't begin to tell you how many of these were disgusting and how many smelled like an ashtray or like someone just fried fish in them. At some point someone asked us if we had looked at any "Country Coach" motorhomes. I've learned a lot about coaches since that day. On a scale of 1 to 10 they are 9.5 in my book. The only thing nicer would be if I could buy a Marathon on a Prevost chassis. The trouble is my name is not Jeff Gordon and I can't afford motorhomes that start at 2.5 million dollars. Country Coaches were built in Junction City Oregon which is just a few miles west of Eugene,Oregon. It is the west coast version of Elkhart Indiana. Eighty percent of all RV's are built in Indiana, and sixty-five percent of those are built in Elkhart. One look at a Country Coach and we were convinced that this is what we wanted. We stopped in at Guaranty RV in Junction City and met with their top salesman, Lindsey. I explained to him what I was looking for and he let me know that Country Coach only built about two 40 ft. 3 axle coaches a year. Well crap! A couple of days later I got a phone call from guess who? The first words out of his mouth were "I've got something you want". In 2007 there was a nice couple that had been rving since 1972. They lived in the Bellingham Wa. area. He was an investment broker and used the rv to travel to meetings all over the U.S. They usually bought a new coach every two years. If I remember correctly this was their seventh Country Coach. The reason they kept this one so long was because in 2010 when we went through the recession, Country Coach was forced to cease production.They were still in business and doing service work but not building any new coaches. Later on they were bought by and still owned by Winnebago. By this time the people from Washington with the 2007 had given up on getting a new Country Coach and decided to trade it in with Lindsey. What do you say to a guy that has the keys in his hand to a 2007, 40ft. three axle Country Coach Magna 630 with a Cummins ISX 600 horsepower (non D.E.F. engine)? We immediately went to see it. The inside of the coach was immaculate. To the best of my knowledge this coach has never been smoked in, it has never had pets in it, it still has the original propane in it because no one ever has fried any food in it and it has always been garaged. To tell you of all the amenities would take several pages. If you are interested just call me. Ever wonder what it costs to paint an rv? I'm not a real big fan of all the neutral, earth tone color paint jobs, so I had a more modern paint job done. $30,000.00 and it looks great. I put all new polished aluminum wheels on and all new Michelin tires. The coach came with all 275/80R22.5's all around. The problem with that is that to achieve your weight rating you need to run about 130 lbs of air pressure in the fronts. Talk about a rough ride. If you ever blew one it wouldn't be the wreck that killed you, it would probably be the concussion. I fixed that problem by going to Michelin 365/70R22.5 which is really wide on a 10.5 inch wheel. By doing so you only have to run about 90 lbs of air pressure and you end up with a much smoother ride. Next problem, this is not a common tire size (yet). So lets say you're in Butthump Saskatchewan and you lose a front. Well, I had to change the S-cams and S-cams tubes to make it work, but I did and now I have the same tires on the tag axle as I do the front. Now you can take one off the tag for the front and replace it with just about any 22in tire and wheel. I also put several thousand dollars of stainless steel on the coach. We replaced the flooring with a high gloss porcelain flooring. This was done by Bobby Vodden who is the owner of Kustom Coach in Junction City. Bobby has spent his entire adult life working on motorhomes and RVs. I have always had Bobby do any and all the work on the coach. We also put a larger inverter and added two more house gel batteries, for a total of six for better dry camping.
THE STACKER TRAILER
As I said earlier, it took a long time to find the trailer. The gentleman that designed them lives in Nebraska, and has a slaughterhouse. I forget just how I was able to find him, but when I did we spent about two hours together on the phone. Great guy. He explained to me that he did all the designing of the trailers and had a local fabrication shop do all of the construction and actual build. They did a great job on the trailer. The people that I bought it from in Florida, or someone before them, hacked it up pretty bad. The gentleman in Nebraska was a really cool guy. He explained to me that the reason he quit building them is that he got tired of building really nice trailers just the way people ordered them and when they were delivered the people tried to pick them apart trying to get him to lower the price. By luck,he gave me the number of a guy in Florida that had one for sale. I had to drive twelve hours to Los Angeles to get it where it was stored. I guess that was still better than having to go to Florida to get it. The trailer originally had just two axles with 17in. rubber. I wanted to get the trailer as low as possible for launching the boat. We completely stripped the trailer down to two bare rails.We notched and sleeved the rails to fit three Dexter 5200 lb torsion bar axles with electric over hydraulic disc brakes on 15 in. tires and wheels. We also revamped the tongue so that it can be stretched out 3 ft. longer.We sandblasted and painted it Corvette gray to match the coach. Last but not least we built large aluminum storage boxes in the tongue and added polished aluminum steps, fenders, and wheels. It has an electric landing leg and electric boat winch.
THE JET BOAT
For as long as I can remember ,I have always had a love for boats. I had my first boat, a 12ft. rowboat when I was only 12 years old. It was given to me by a friend of the family. I remember my father having to take me and a couple of my buddies down to the bay every chance we got and we would spend the entire day rowing and fishing in the bay. I saved my money and bought a used Sears 5hp. outboard for it, boy were we cool now! I was thirteen when I built my first 8ft.pram. When I was eighteen I bought a brand new 14ft. drift boat.That was a game changer. That was in 1972 and there were maybe a dozen in Humboldt County. Five years later all our local rivers were inundated with drift boats. Bankees versus drifters, why can't everybody get along? I bought my first sled in about 1975. It was a 16 ft. Alumaweld flat bottom. It had a really trick paint job and a 70hp.Merc w/a San Leandro pump. I bought it from the infamous "One Armed Willie Illingworth" I put a 140 Merc on and kept it for many years. Fast forward to 2001 when I married my NEW wife. I had a 9000 sq.ft. shop and she told me that I needed to "declutter" it. One ocean boat, four drift boats,and four sleds. I hardly considered that clutter. So I got rid of some of them and some I replaced with newer ones. I had Mark at Fish Rite build me several boats over the years, and some were pretty cool. One that I still have is a 16ft sled w/a 5 degree 72in. bottom powered by a 65/90 Merc. It is so light and so wide that once up on step it will hold a plane at about 10 mph my wife calls this her boat. She enjoys going up the river at her own pace. Mark built me a 23 ft.Commander with a 496 cu.in. Chevy Vortec (8.1 liter) that put out 450 horsepower. Or how about a 22ft.X 84 in.center console w/a hydraulic windshield that you can put up in the morning when it is cold going up the river, when it warms up the windshield tucks down inside the boat. It sure made people take a second look! It was powered with a 6 liter w/full flow aluminum heads putting out 400 hp. The last new boat I had built before the stacker boat was a 23ft.X 84in. Willie Fusion which is an open tiller steer boat. This is what you see most of the Salmon and Steelhead guides using in the Northwest. They work so well because you are always close to the kicker motor, great for backtrolling and no wasted space. I really loved the boat, unfortunately it was too long, too heavy for the top rack and it was too wide to go between the back uprights of the trailer. Thus came the smaller version of the guide boat. The new boat was custom built by Mark who now owns Chandler Custom Fabrication in White city Ore. It is 20ft.long and has an 82 in.bottom. However the gunwales have been kept down to 96in. so that they will fit between the rear uprights of the trailer. The bottom is .190 thickness and the sides are .125.The boat was built in 2016 and is powered with a Yamaha 175 SHO (stands for super high output). This was by far the best horsepower to weight ratio engine for this boat. This boat only made two trips up to the Skeena and the motor only has 27 hours on it. The kicker motor is a Yamaha 9.9 high thrust, with paint and decals to match the 175.
The boat was painted by the same people in Eugene that painted the motorhome. That means that it was painted with Sikkens Paint and 3 coats of clear.($4,500.00) When I ordered the motors, I ordered the 175 as a prop motor and switched it over to a San Leandro Pump, this way you also get the lower unit if you want to run a prop. Most people have it so that you have to lift the motor on the transom for the pump, then have to lower it 5in. to. run the prop. This can be a real pain in the pooper. This is set up with an exact height on the transom for the best performance w/the pump. To change over to the prop you just unbolt the lower unit and install the "BAY" section, made by the BAYCo. and your lower unit will be 5in. longer to accommodate your prop. This only takes about 30 minutes.
Now for the goodies. Underfloor fuel tank- bilge pump- running lights-vinyl floors-bow anchor release-top loading rod lockers w/strip lighting - Uni-rail side rails-(special thanks to Willie Boats for allowing me to use their patented rail) storage cover snaps on outside rail -sliding rod holders inside with rubber rod protectors on inside rail(polished outside)-five degree bottom w/tunnel hull - 4 strakes - lockable sounder boxes w/removable doors -warm water wash basin built in transom- twelve inch deluxe splash tray w/locking door - two "Plano" sliding tackle tray compartments w/locking doors - Raycon fuel water separator system - transom washdown w/ coil hose - two Odyssey PC 12 oot dry batteries - fishbox split lengthwise w/ running water to both sections -under side trays w/ 6 LED lights - three adjustable locking seat boxes -16in.four legged guide pedestal w/ Tempress seats on all- four sliding rod bases - River hawk anchor bracket w/stainless steel "Springer" anchor - mooring cover - Lowrance marine radio in starboard lockable compartment Lowrance HDS 10 fishfinder with side scan in a lockable compartment on the port side. I think that's about it, just add water and stir!!!
THE TRUCK
I ordered this truck new in 2012. It only has 39,545 original miles on it. It is a 2012 Colorado 4WD Crew Cab 2LT. I think I ordered it with every option available. There was an option that was only done for a couple of years and that was an upgrade from a 3.7 litre inline 5 cylinder engine to a 5.3 litre V8. You can probably guess which one I ordered. What a screamer!! I also added a few things like a Linex bed liner, rear load leveling air bags w/onboard compressor, trailer brake controller and all the stuff to make it towable behind the motorhome. This consists of the tow bar assembly. All of the bracketry under the front and the "Air Force One" braking system so that when you apply the brakes in the motorhome it also slows the pickup down to prevent jackknifing. It was all installed professionally at Guarantee in Junction city-about 5 grand. Where we stayed in Terrace we had a 50 amp service for us to plug into allowing us to set up camp once and leave it for a month. Before we unhooked from the motorhome we would unload the pickup from the trailer and then lower the boat down and use the pickup to drive a short mile down the road to the boat ramp.
I realize that not everyone’s thing in life is fishing(hard to visualize) but if it's not and someone were interested in only the motorhome and the trailer, let me know. It wouldn't take much fabrication to change the upper deck from a boat hauler to something to play in the sand or what have you. Boat trailer, sand rail trailer, or what have you, I will guarantee you one thing, you'd better get used to people staring at you going up the road. They go by you smiling and giving you the OK sign or the thumbs up sign whenever, you stop somewhere, be prepared to answer all kinds of questions all the way from "Do you mind if I take a picture of it?" Or the best one is when they ask you how you get the boat up on top? Oh, I just get a run at it. There is a six lane wide stretch of freeway between Sumas B.C. where we cross the border and the town of Hope. On the very first trip a nice looking Dodge pickup was on my left side looking things over for a ways. When all of a sudden they shot clear over next to the median and this girl hung out the passenger window clear to her waist (I thought sure she was going to fall out) and started taking pictures. I looked over at my wife and she was shaking her head. My hearing isn't the best but I 'm pretty sure what she was saying couldn't have been good. Bottom line, it's a head turner.
On a Scale of one to ten, getting old has a suck factor of about fourteen. I realize that this is reality and is inevitable, but it just seems kind of cruel to have your mind want to do one thing and your body is saying "you've got to be kidding,right? All of those things that we used to do and took for granted are now no more than dust in the wind, and it all happened in the blink of an eye. Do you know what a roll of toilet paper and 'Life' have in common? The closer you get to the end the faster they go! If I've heard it once, I've heard it a million times "if I knew I was going to live this long I would have taken better care of myself. Words of wisdom from a certified idiot.
It's kind of like working on an old car. Well, I'll just get this fixed and we'll be good to go for a long time. I don't want to bore you with all the misc. stuff, just the biggies are enough. Remember when in the beginning I told you about my wife sitting me down? There were blood clots in both lungs and the doctors were telling all my family that I would not make it through the night. The only good thing about that day was it was mid November and we got our first big push of rain the night before. That morning we were just above tide water on the Smith River hooking one after another. All chromers in the thirties.I started feeling like crap, so my buddies rushed me down to Eureka, to the ER. I remember everyone crying and telling me goodbye. If they hadn't sedated me so badly I could have gotten a lot of people to sign some pretty wild agreements! As it was, there were a lot of surprised people the next morning when the fat guy woke up! From that day on I had to take blood thinners. Nasty crap, especially if your blood gets too thin as mine did and the next thing you know you are being flown to San Francisco on a Cal-Ore flight. No cocktails on that flight. The doctor said that I had an acute aneurysm and that luckily my blood pressure dropped low enough that it coagulated. Fat Boy Saved Again!!!!
My first back surgery was in 2008 . I had four vertebrates that grew wrong and pinched my spinal cord. At UCSF, they took two of them out, ground them into a mortar, and built me a new Vertebra. The only bad thing is it left me with a lot of issues from the neck down. Number two was a lumbar issue done in Scottsdale Az at the Laser Spine Institute. The third surgery was done at Stanford where they corrected some spinal stenosis (fancy name for arthritis) and put in two 8 in. rods. After the surgery the doctor told me that he was only able to repair a small amount of it due to the time limit that I was under anesthesia and that I would need to
come back down after I healed to finish the rest. I told him that it was a good thing that human nature allows us to forget things over time, because until I forget how bad that hurt, he wasn't going to see my sorry ass down there again!! Three years later I had to eat those words(not the first time I've let my alligator mouth overload my hummingbird ass)and they took no pity on the fat boy. The first day they deliberately broke my spine in two places and drove 15 degree wedges in the vertebrates.They threw me in the cooler for the night, and on day two they did the same to three more.For the grand finale they removed the two 8in. rods and upgraded me.
I got the deluxe package of two 18in. rods. I was down there for three weeks, and they had me so drugged up that I don't even remember the first two weeks. So maybe now you can understand why I feel like someone drove a 4X4 up my you know where and didn't stop until they got to my shoulders.
We would also make a couple of trips a year back to Vegas and the Phoenix area with just the pickup in tow. There's nothing like setting your own schedule. No more airports, no more catching all the colds and whatever else from people on a plane. No more expensive hotel rooms that can be disgusting. You go down the road a couple hours and want a cup of coffee, so be it. You want to stop for lunch, find a spot with a view, open a pop out and enjoy. You want to stop for a potty break, go for it and I want you to know that in an upscale motorhome you don't have a plastic toilet, nope a real bonafide porcelain throne! When we started out most mornings my wife would usually put something in the crockpot and it would be ready for dinner. We had to make sure we made at least one trip to Vegas each year. We met a really nice guy and his son that do motorhome washing and waxing. Every year we made sure that it got waxed. We always made at least one trip to Phoenix. Which when we started was the last Nascar race before the championship race in Homestead. Now the Championship race is actually the race we go to in Phoenix. The reason you need to take notice of this is because we have a reserved space at the track that we have had for several years. There are thousands of RV's that show up for this event. The problem is that over 90% of them have to camp out on the dirt. One year it rained, need I say more? The reserved space we have is damn near a stone's throw from the entrance to the track, on the BLACKTOP. The person who purchases the motorhome will have the option of continuing this if they would like in their name. I will pay for the first year while it gets transfered.
To say I enjoyed the motorhome would really be an understatement .However, it is time to move on with life.The motorhome and the trailer haven't been licensed the last two years(non-oped of course) and the boat since 2019. It all sits out in my shop waiting for me to make up my mind on selling it. Okay, time for someone else to have a really good time. I learned something very valuable just a little too late in life. When we first got the motorhome and started meeting so many nice people in the RV parks one thing really stood out to me. I Thought that most of the people I would be meeting would be over the age of 65. Boy was I in for a rude awakening. Half of the people I met were in their early 60's and in their 50's and even 40's, and they would all tell me the same thing. How do I know what my health will be like at 65 or if I will even still be alive, life is too short to wait for things like this.Why did everyone else end up being so much smarter than me?
Thanks for hearing me out
Louis